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‘They’re getting on your nerves, aren’t they?’ she surmised. ‘Our lovely fellow travellers.’

Finn rubbed water out of his eyes.

‘I get on my own nerves,’ he said. ‘Because I think it’s my problem.’

‘What is?’

‘Not rising like a spiritual soufflé up here. It seems almost unavoidable. Everyone is constantly coming out with the loveliest philosophical observations. There isn’t anyone who hasn’t a clever thing to say. Some of them burst into tears at the very sight of the Earth, others wallow in self-mortification at the thought of their earthly striving. Eva sees injustice and Mukesh Nair sees miracles and wonder in every grain of moon dust. A complete social elite seem determined to relativise their previous lives, just because they’re sitting on a lump of stone so far from the Earth that you can see the whole thing. And what occurs to me? Just a stupid old saying from the Pre-Cambrian era of space travel.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘Astronauts are men who don’t have to bring their wives anything back from their travels.’

‘Pretty dumb.’

‘You see? Everyone seems to
find himself
up here. And I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be
looking
for.’

‘So? Let them.’

‘I did say it isn’t their problem. It’s mine.’

‘You’re complaining on quite a high level, my dearest Finn.’

‘No, I’m not.’ He glared at her angrily. ‘It hasn’t the slightest thing to do with self-pity. I just feel
empty
, crippled. I’d love to feel that same powerful emotion, vaporise with reverence and get back to Earth inside out, to preach the word of enlightenment, but I don’t feel any of it. I can’t think of anything to say about this trip except that it’s nice, it’s a bit different. But it is, and remains, the bloody Moon, damn it all! No higher level of existence, no understanding or comprehension of anything at all. It doesn’t spiritualise me, it stirs nothing in me, and that’s
got
to be my problem!
There must be more!
I feel as if I’ve withered away.’

Doggy-paddling, they drifted towards one another. And while Heidrun was still wondering what she could reply to this outburst without sounding like a maiden aunt, she was suddenly close to him. His lines and wrinkles revealed a life of clueless carousal. She recognised Finn’s inability to make his brilliant talent chime with the banal realisation that in spite of his special gift he was not a special person, simply alive and, like everyone else, damned, on the highway that they were all hurtling along, one day to crash into the wall without ever having come close to the meaning of everything. Not a trace of apotheosis. Just someone who had had too much of everything without ever feeling sated by it, and who now, in his total
cluelessness, reacted more honestly to the impressions of the journey than the rest of the group put together.

A moment later she sensed him.

She felt his hands on her hips, her backside. She felt them exploring her waist and back, his lips strangely cool on hers, wrapped both legs around him and pulled him so tightly to her that his sex pressed against hers, ambushed by the brazenness of his approach and even more by her own simmering readiness for a fling. She knew she was about to do something incredibly stupid that she would bitterly regret afterwards, but the whole catechism of marital fidelity was consumed in the heat of that moment, and if men thought with their dicks, as was so often rightly said, then her will and intelligence had just irrevocably faded away in her cunt, and that too was something so terrifyingly banal that all she could do was erupt with laughter.

Finn joined in.

It was the worst thing he could have done. Even an irritated twitch of his eyebrows would have saved her, a hint of incomprehension, but he just laughed and started rubbing her between the legs until she was terrified, even as her fingers clawed at the hem of his trunks and pulled them down, to liberate the engorged beast within.

Water monkeys, she thought. We’re water monkeys!

Uh! Uh!

‘I’d leave it if I were you,’ she heard Nina Hedegaard saying, just before the water started splashing. ‘He’ll bring you nothing but frustration and a whole host of problems.’

As if struck by lightning they parted. Finn reached irritably for his trunks. Heidrun dipped her head beneath the surface, breathed in crater water, came back up and coughed her lungs up. Scooping water like a paddle-steamer, Nina passed them on her back.

‘Sorry, I didn’t want to spoil your fun. But you should really think about it.’

And that was that.

Heidrun lacked the genetic prerequisites for blushing, but at that moment she could have sworn she turned
beetroot
, a beacon of embarrassment. She stared at Finn. To her infinite relief nothing in his expression suggested that the past few minutes had been embarrassing to him, only regret and a vague understanding that it was over. He plainly still wanted her, and she wanted him a bit less, but at the same time she felt an urgent longing for Walo, and the desire to kiss Nina for her intervention.

‘Yeah, we’ – Finn grinned crookedly – ‘were just about to go upstairs.’

‘So I saw,’ Nina said sullenly. She swam powerfully over to them and stood up in the water. ‘I’ll keep my mouth shut, don’t worry. The rest is your business. They’re
starting to get worried up there. Julian’s group still isn’t back, and neither are the satellites.’

‘Didn’t Julian say anything?’ Heidrun asked, her whole body still one big heartbeat. ‘This morning, I mean.’

‘No, he said they’d be showing up later. Too busy a schedule, says Lynn.’

‘Then that’s how it is.’

‘Seems odd to me.’

‘Julian would definitely have tried to get through, to you first of all,’ said O’Keefe.

‘Yeah, great, and what would you do, Finn, if you didn’t get through? You’d be on time! So as not to worry the others. And I’m not stupid, there’s more to it than that. There’s something they aren’t telling me.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘Dana Lawrence, the cold fish. Lynn. Who knows? Dinner’s now been arranged for nine, by the way.’

Heidrun could tell by the tip of Finn’s nose that he was thinking exactly the same as she was, whether they shouldn’t make use of that time in his suite. But it was a pale, threadbare thought, less than a thought, in fact, since it came not from the head, not from the heart, but from the abdomen, whose coup had just been permanently thwarted. Finn slipped over and gave her a quick kiss. There was something conciliatory, something final about it.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go up and join the others.’

After the conversation with Palstein, Jericho had taken a trip around the highly armed information centre and introduced Jennifer to the contents of his rucksack.

‘Diane,’ he said. ‘The fourth member of the alliance.’

‘Diane?’ An eyebrow rose in her grumpy face.

‘Mm-hm. Diane.’

‘I see. Your daughter or your wife?’

Since then Diane had been alternately connected to the public internet and the internal, hacker-protected intranet of the Big O, a system locked against the outside world, with no way in, but no way out either. Jennifer had summarily authorised him to access parts of the company’s own database, equipped with a password that allowed him to trace the global network of the company, its history and its staff
structure. At the same time, thanks to Diane, he was working on familiar ground. Without the company of Tu or Yoyo, who had wanted to visit the fat guy for a few minutes and had been overdue since then, he felt miserably alone, just a messenger, good enough to lay his head on the line for others, but not to be taken into anybody’s friendly confidence.

Pah, friends! Let the two of them wallow in misery. At last he was warmed again by Diane’s soft, dark computer voice, untroubled by any kind of sensitivity.

He asked her to go through the net for arrangements of terms,
Palstein
,
attempted murder
,
assassination
,
assassin
,
Orley
,
China
,
investigations
,
discoveries
,
results
, etc. On the oil manager’s initiative, the Canadian authorities had sent a large supply of pictures and film material which he, Edda Hoff, a member of the IT security department and a woman from MI6 were now assessing together. If only Palstein had been willing to hand over the video that supposedly showed his attacker, they could presumably have spared themselves all that wretched work. Diane brought him things she’d found about the Calgary shooting the way a cat brings in half-dead mice, but where the rest of the decoding of the text fragment was concerned she was poking around in the dark. Clearly the hurricane murmur of the dark network had fallen silent. In contrast, pictures, reports, assessments and conspiracy theories about Calgary were flooding in, but without shedding light on anything.

He went to see Jennifer Shaw.

‘Good to see you.’ Jennifer was in a video conference with representatives of MI6, and waved him in. ‘If you’ve got anything new—’

‘When was Gaia originally supposed to open?’ Jericho asked, pulling up a chair.

‘You know that. Last year.’

‘When exactly?’

‘Okay, it had been planned for late summer, but projects like that are never as ready as you hope they’re going to be. It could have been autumn or winter.’

‘And because of the Moon crisis—’

‘No, not just because of that.’ Norrington came into the room. ‘You’re in the temple of truth here, Owen. We’re happy to admit that there were technical delays. The unofficial opening was scheduled for August 2024, but even without a crisis we’d hardly have managed it before 2025.’

‘So the completion date wasn’t foreseeable at the time?’

‘Why do you ask?’ one of the MI6 people wanted to know.

‘Because I’m wondering whether the mini-nuke was put up there only in order to destroy Gaia. Something people knew
would
be finished, but didn’t know
when
. But when the satellite was started, it wasn’t finished.’

‘You’re right,’ the MI6 man said thoughtfully. ‘They could have waited for the launch, in fact they should have done.’

‘Why should they?’ asked another one.

‘Because every atom bomb gives off radiation. You can’t store a thing like that on the Moon indefinitely, where there’s no convection to carry away the heat. There’s a danger of the bomb overheating and going off prematurely.’

‘So it was definitely supposed to detonate in 2024,’ Jennifer surmised.

‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ said Jericho. ‘Was it or is it meant only for Gaia? How much explosive do you need to blow up a hotel?’

‘Lots,’ said Norrington.

‘But not an atom bomb?’

‘Not unless you want to contaminate the whole site, the wider surroundings,’ said the MI6 man.

Jericho nodded. ‘So what’s up with it?’

‘With the Vallis Alpina?’ Jennifer thought for a minute. ‘Nothing, as far as I know. But that needn’t mean anything.’

‘What are you getting at?’ asked Norrington.

‘Very simple,’ Jericho said. ‘If we agree that the bomb was to be detonated in 2024, regardless of whether Gaia had been completed or not, the question arises as to why it didn’t happen.’

‘Because something got in the way,’ Jennifer reflected.

Jericho smiled. ‘Because something got in
someone’s
way. Because
someone
was prevented from setting the thing off, one way or another. That means we should stop wondering about the where and the when, and concentrate on that person who
possibly
, in fact
probably
isn’t called Carl Hanna. So who was on the Moon or on the way to the Moon last year who could have detonated the bomb? What happened to make sure that it didn’t go off?’

And meanwhile he was thinking: who am I telling all this to? Jennifer had mentioned the possibility of a mole, a traitor who drew his information from the inner security circle. Who was the mole? Edda Hoff, opaque and brittle? One of the divisional directors? Tom Merrick, that bundle of nerves responsible for communication security – could he have been responsible for the block that he was pretending to investigate? And apart from Andrew Norrington, was there someone listening to his hypotheses who shouldn’t have known about them? Always allowing that Jennifer hadn’t mentioned moles to distract attention from herself.

How safe were they really in the Big O?

The chronological recording was swiftly reconstructed. True to its name, the Grave-digger burrowed its way into the depths of the system and drew up a complete list, but because this encompassed activities carried out over several days, it looked like something that would keep you occupied for three rainy weekends.

‘Shit,’ whispered Sophie.

But if you cut down the periods of time in question, the work went faster than you might have expected. And the faker’s trail ran like a pattern through the recordings, because after every action he erased his traces. The video of Hanna’s night-time trip, for example, had been recut while the Canadian had been exploring Gaia’s surroundings with Julian, or more precisely between a quarter past six and half past on the morning in question. Unambiguous proof that Hanna himself hadn’t set about erasing his traces.

Where had
she
been at that point? In bed. Hadn’t got up till seven. Until then the lobby and the control centre had been populated only by machines. In a simultaneous projection, she screened all the recordings of the period during which the phantom had done his work, but no one left his room, no one crouched in a hidden corner operating the system from somewhere else.

Impossible!

Someone must surely have been wandering about the hotel at that time.

Had these videos been manipulated too?

She studied the recordings more precisely, and had the computer examine all the films for subsequently introduced cuts.

Sure enough.

Sophie stared at the monitor wall. This thing was getting increasingly weird. Everything she saw here, or rather didn’t see, was evidence of unsettling professionalism and strength of nerve. If it went on like this, in the end she would have to go through every single order in the vague hope that the faker might give himself away by some tiny blunder. Just as it had soared a moment before, her mood now plummeted. It was pointless. The stranger had used his time and opportunities to the full, he was ahead of her.